Bad blood

24

Virgil lay between Coakley's long legs, with his head on her tummy, and she lazily scratched his scalp with her nails, and she said, "I keep thinking, one more day and it'll be back to normal."

Virgil said, "Yeah."

"Oh, I know," she said. "I had four more media interviews today, but I'm going to give them up. I'll do People, but I'll be damned if I'm going on National Outrage, or whatever it is."

"Good decision," Virgil said. He found his sex life tended to be enhanced if he let her ramble for a while; in the meantime, he observed, she had the most consistently clean belly button he'd ever encountered.

"The attorney general's office is complaining about our record-keeping," Coakley said. "Their lead attorney got really snarky about the evidence stream, and I said, 'We had seven dead and nine wounded people and a hundred abused kids and nobody knows how many more from the past, and you're worried that I didn't use the right paper clips?' She's like twenty-nine."

"Paper clips?" Virgil asked. He was now re-contemplating her laser job, and wondering why it had resulted in a pubic trapezoid (a four-sided polygon having exactly one pair of parallel sides, the parallel sides being referred to as the bases, or, in Coakley's case, the top and bottom, and being composed of short reddish-blond hair; the sum of the angles being 360 degrees).

"Of course, the paper clips aren't important now, but a year from now they might be, when all the trials get going," Coakley said. "I've told the commission that I need to hire a couple of retired attorneys to come in and do the paperwork. The AG's office will handle all the actual victim interviews, the regional public defender will take all the defense stuff, so what I need to do, is organize the arrest-level records. Starting now. Forget the interviews."

"Sounds right." The question being, Virgil thought, Why a trapezoid? Why not a regular triangle, say, or a rhombus? Or something baroque, with curves?

"But then," Coakley asked, "how do you say no to the Today show?"

"Dunno," Virgil muttered.

"You know what? I'm the one who put the M16 on the wall behind the desk. I had John do it, right before the interview," she said. "I didn't want any of this 'Housewife-sheriff makes big fuss.' That reporter from the Times kept wanting to talk about baking bread and raising children as a single working mother. I kept telling her, 'Hey, I'm the sheriff. I carry a gun. I shoot at people.' And she was like, 'Do you grow your own rosemary?' I think it was the first time she'd ever been out of New York City. I wanted to apologize for not making artisanal goat cheese in my spare time."

Virgil said, "Mmm, artisanal goat cheese."

That made her laugh, and she scratched again, which Virgil thought was pretty erotic. She said, "You know what I like about you, Virgil?"

"Whazat?"

"You really listen to me. So many guys don't really listen to women." A WEEK HAD GONE BY since the chaos of the shoot-outs, the first arrests, the fires, the sequestering of children from World of Spirit families. The church situation was more complicated than Virgil had known it to be-there were World of Spirit families that did not participate in the church's sexual activities, and those families usually met for services separate from the branch of the church led by the late Emmett Einstadt. Those families had known of the child abuse, though, and so were not entirely out of the woods.

The commissioner of Public Safety, Rose Marie Roux, and Virgil's boss, Lucas Davenport, had come down the next day, and Roux had offered priority service with the BCA labs on any evidence collected during the follow-up. Teams were going through the burned houses, based on the report from Virgil and Schickel on the immolation of Junior Einstadt. Only a few bone fragments were found, and only one, a piece of jawbone, had anything that looked like a bullet hole. The whole question of proving the dead men's participation in the assault on the Rouse place was up in the air.

The governor, sounding as though he'd had one too many manhattans, called Virgil late one night and asked, "Is it possible for you to stay out of trouble for one year in a row? I mean, the whole goddamned state's embarrassed by this. It's almost like we're Massachusetts, or something."

"Well, hell, Governor, if you can't spin it better than that-"

"I can spin it better than that-this proves our system works, that we're ever-vigilant when it comes to child welfare, et cetera. Hey-are you pimping me?"

"Maybe," Virgil said.

"Huh. Well played, Virgil. Come see me when you get back. I got a new pair of Tres Outlaws cowboy boots you should see."

The Ag's office had looked at the investigatory chain that led from the first tip about Karl Rouse taking lots of Polaroids, to Kathleen Spooner's confirmation of child abuse by the Rouses, through the search warrant, and had given that chain its stamp of approval. A continuing stream of information from Kristy Rouse had included the identification of all the participants in child sex in the photos, and including background watchers of the sexual activities, had eventually led to the arrest or charging of most of the members of the church.

Twelve families had simply vanished. They were being sought. Twenty-two adult males had also fled, leaving their families behind. Several of the families and individual males were known to have crossed into Canada. Kristy Rouse told AG interviewers that some World of Spirit families had moved to Canada years ago and started a colony there, but she didn't know exactly where. Alma Flood confirmed it, but also said she didn't know exactly where, but she thought Alberta.

Canadian authorities were inquiring after them, but since Alberta was considerably bigger than France, and full of rapidly growing industries with tens of thousands of outsiders, progress could be slow.

Assets had been frozen. The World of Spirit members had been on the land for a long time, and had generally prospered. Most of their farms covered a square mile or more, often had small or no mortgages, and the land was worth $4,000 an acre. The average net value of more than two million dollars each brought defense attorneys flocking to Homestead, and a general strategy was beginning to emerge: blame the males.

They were generally toast anyway, the thinking went, and if the wives and children could blame the husbands, they might stay out of prison and hold on to the land, less the cost of their legal defense, of course.

Virgil ran into Tom Parker, the attorney he'd spoken to his first day in town, and his associate, Laurie, whose last name Virgil never discovered. Parker said, "I'm gonna get you made an honorary member of the Warren County Bar Association. I mean, holy cow, Virgil. If we don't get run over by all these outsiders, we've got ten years' work for every guy in town."

"That wasn't an essential part of my plan," Virgil said.

"Oh, hell, I know that-but this is always what happens, isn't it?" Parker said, in good cheer. "In a book, everybody walks away from the dead bodies, but in real life, there's always more trouble after the fight than before. You can tear down a house in a day, but cleanup takes a week."

Laurie said, "I've spoken to Alma Flood, and she's going to sign me up to do her defense. I admire that little talk you gave, about sex and slavery, before she shot those men. I expect I'll ask you to repeat it to a jury, if it gets that far. And Mr. Jenkins, of course; we will be talking with him."

"I'll look forward to it. It'll give me another chance to eat at the Yellow Dog," Virgil said.

Flood was undergoing psychiatric examination. Virgil doubted that she'd be convicted of anything, unless Laurie was a fool, but it would be some time before Flood was free; years, maybe.

Flood's daughters, Edna and Helen, were primary sources of information about the World of Spirit, as was Kristy Rouse. Rouse's father had vanished, but her mother had been arrested and jailed. The Rouses' computer, which Coakley had thrown out the window of the burning house, was damaged, but the FBI computer lab had recovered the contents of the hard drive, including all eight-thousand-plus photos.

The children had been sequestered, interviewed, and counseled by a battalion of lawyers, psychologists, and social workers. Some were phlegmatic and silent; others were gushers of information, accusations, and horror stories. Incest had been routine, as had rape. One peculiarity that had been winkled out by a reporter from the Los Angeles Times: they almost all tested close to the top in academic achievement for their equivalent grade levels. That finding started a minor pie fight among the state educational establishment, which eventually ended in an agreement that other Minnesota children would get equal educations if educator salaries were higher.

The media attention had been intense. There were no rooms in I-90 motels between Blue Earth, to the east, and Worthington in the west. Virgil had succeeded in staying out of sight, but Coakley had shown an interesting ability to deal with the media, and Virgil had heard talk of a reality TV show called Law Woman.

"The way I see it," he told Coakley, as he lay between her legs, "you do two years of Law Woman at a million dollars per year, before it gets canceled because nobody's watching it, but you'll have made about what you could expect to get for, what? Twenty-five years of working in Homestead?"

"No way that'd happen," she said, although she seemed interested in the idea. "There are women sheriffs of a lot bigger counties than this. The TV people would want something where you got a shooting every week."

"But those women are bureaucrats, not heroines," Virgil said. "You're a heroine. You saved a little girl from a lynch mob."

"You and Jenkins saved me from a lynch mob."

"But we weren't inside the Alamo with the girl child and the box of evidence, and you were. Gunfights in the hallway, fire creeping up the stairs," Virgil said. "Remember, we're talking about a TV show." THEY HAD no idea where Harvey Loewe had gone. He'd simply disappeared. Testimony from WOS kids said that Harvey had abused several of the younger boys, and had been thoroughly abused himself when he was a teenager.

Virgil couldn't figure out the equities of that, and had trouble working out the exact definition of justice for so many other WOS members. Some of the women had turned out to be as vicious as their husbands, but some had actually seemed to be more captive than anything else. If somebody had been hammered into submission since childhood, could you really blame them for not sneaking out and running for the law?

Birdy Olms had run because she had already been in the World of Law. Kathleen Spooner hadn't run when she could have. Prosecutors were reviewing Spooner's file, and the general thinking was that she'd be charged with murder, along with a list of other, sex-related crimes.

Two other female members of the WOS had suggested that they hadn't run from their husbands because they believed they would be murdered by Spooner. They'd heard rumors of other members drifting from the church and suddenly disappearing. Virgil tended to believe them; tended to believe that Spooner might be the rare female serial killer.

Kelly Baker's parents were both arrested and jailed, and both were found in the Rouse photo collection, in sexual contact with children. If enough evidence could be found that they had known what had happened to their daughter, and had covered it up, they would both be charged with murder. But since they were both headed for lifetime prison terms, and Minnesota did not have capital punishment, a murder charge was basically moot.

The John Baker family, from Iowa, was among those that disappeared into Canada. Iowa investigators found that he'd taken a large equity loan on his home earlier in the winter, had kept it in cash in the bank, and had cleaned it out starting on the day that Virgil and Bill Clinton had visited them. Based on information from Alma Flood and other cooperating church members, a murder warrant was issued for both Baker and his wife, in Kelly Baker's death. There were indications that Baker had been growing marijuana out in an otherwise useless low spot in one of his fields; none of the church members seemed to know about that.

And finally, Bob Tripp was spun out of the story as a kind of folk hero, taking out a major bad guy, in revenge for what was done to his friend Kelly Baker. Tripp's parents had been on several national television shows, talking about his athletic accomplishments, and the sense of fair play earned on Homestead's athletic fields. Virgil hadn't decided what to think about that, either-Tripp might have been better going to the sheriff with his story about Kelly Baker… but what if he'd innocently talked to Jim Crocker, and had been killed for what he knew? The World of Spirit might have continued untouched…

He never did work it out, but that didn't bother him too much, because he believed that a lot of the things that happened in the world couldn't be adequately or logically settled. Bob Tripp was like a modern-day John Brown, written small: a murderer in a good cause.

Virgil and Coakley had been conferring fairly often, and most of the town of Homestead knew it. Bill Jacoby, owner of the Yellow Dog, made a couple of cryptic references to relationships and midlife sex, and Virgil realized he was probing for evidence. He gave him none; but neither did Jacoby quit probing.

As for the relationship itself, Virgil could see it lasting awhile… but not forever. Coakley was a hell of a woman, but was looking for a little more stability than Virgil could offer. In the meantime, the conferences continued. "

What does 'The Virgins' mean?" she asked one night, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"It's a band," Virgil said.

"You look… odd. You know, walking around in a 'Virgins' T-shirt and your penis sticking straight out from under it. It's like 'Virgins' is some kind of caption."

"Hmm. Yes, it is sticking straight out. Maybe sniffing out an opportunity."

"Well, what the heck better does it have to do, on a cold winter night in Minnesota?" Coakley asked. "Come over here, Virgil."